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Horizon

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S48-E12 Horizon: Global Weirding

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Review

by David Butcher

This week’s Very Big Number from Horizon: the Met Office’s computer can do one hundred trillion calculations — a second. It needs to, in order to process the gouts of data gathered from satellites, data which means, we’re told, that a five-day forecast today is as accurate as a one-day forecast was 30 years ago. (Were we so long-suffering in 1982?)

All this technology isn’t to feed some quaint British obsession with weather, it’s to keep track of increasingly freakish extremes in meteorology, not just here but around the world: from record rains in Scotland to droughts in Texas and a boom in hurricanes. Scientists are trying to get to grips with it all and Horizon follows them, in one amazing scene, right into the heart of the storm.

Summary

The work of scientists trying to understand why the world's weather seems to be getting more extreme and if these patterns are a taste of what is to come. In the past few years, the UK has experienced very cold winters, drought and floods, while in Texas an unprecedented amount of rainfall has been followed by a record-breaking dry period.